If, mind you, the anonymous commentator is correct in the assumption that the traffic stats represent not so much the popularity of a distro, but instead the number of individuals needing to be helped, it places Mint in the most favorable position. I guess Mint users just don't require the hand holding, and the step by step guidance that the ubuntu crowd does.

I don't go to the linux mint page everyday, but I go to the distrowatch page just to get mint counted everyday. I don't even know if it does anything but I thought I read somewhere that's how the rankings are done. so I just swing by everyday for a sec just in case.

- We don't know the size of our user base. - We seem to have as many users as Fedora or PCLinuxOS, more than Mandriva, less than OpenSUSE and far less than Debian or Ubuntu. (thanks to distrowatch awstats for that).- Our user base doubled with the release of Daryna. - Our user base was slowly going down after Hardy got released and is slowly going back up since we released the Elyssa RCs. - About 10% of our user base runs KDE CE. (thanks to a poll on the Mint Connection blog)- About 15% of our user base runs an Elyssa RC. - About 80% of our user base runs Daryna. - And everything we know, we're not sure of

We also know the geographical repartition of the user base, the most popular screen resolutions and a few other stats...

We also know that most of the people who get to know about Mint via the Net, come through Distrowatch and Google.

But the real question everybody is wondering about is how many people run Mint... and to be honest we don't have a clue. The last time I estimated it I was looking at 7% of the Linux desktop market... and even this is a wild guess. We can see stats go up and down and get a good idea of what the trends are, but since we don't know the proportion of the user base ending up in our stats ... we really don't have a clue.